Monitoring and diagnostic (M&D) centers can provide numerous services for power plant units as well as other assets. Such services may include asset monitoring, event tracking, trip event reporting, root cause classification, forced outage detection, diagnostics and reporting with various recommendations to a site. Raw operational data as well as post-processed data can be derived from analytics which may be used by various engineering teams for performance and reliability studies, warranty support, and engineering research and development.
However, new requirements are being imposed for the large set of existing power plants requiring relatively secure file transfers. Many sites need to comply with North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) or other regulatory security requirements and other communication security challenges. In addition, many of these sites have limited bandwidth connections and relatively unstable or otherwise unreliable links.
Typically, the onsite monitoring is located within the power plant infrastructure. The onsite network is usually protected by firewalls and a proxy at the plant edge that may prevent inbound connections and thus enforcing that the onsite monitoring is non-routable. Furthermore, all standard bi-directional TCP/HTTP communication ports are usually blocked by the firewall to ensure the security of the system. In addition, secure remote access is needed to provide monitoring and diagnostic users with the ability to remotely access the onsite monitoring and perform certain administration and management tasks.
Current communications typically require a bi-directional based communication ports schema, and current data transport technologies are generally not able to adequately deal with dial-up or low bandwidth network topologies (e.g., significant latency, bandwidth management under stress conditions). Furthermore, a uni-directional general purpose file transfer solution is not available.
In order to meet new and ever growing customer security requirements, relatively secure file transfer solutions are needed to provide secure data transfer for transport of data between an onsite monitoring system and a central monitoring and diagnostic infrastructure. A secure file transfer package is needed to be deployed to support onsite monitoring sites with limited bandwidth connections and relatively unstable or otherwise unreliable links that can comply with NERC or other regulatory requirements and other communication security challenges.